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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Security Practices question
On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Scott Francis wrote: On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 05:48:16PM -0700, [email protected] said: > In an environment where every sysadmin is interchangable, and any one > of them can be woken up at 3am to fix the random problem of the day, > you tell me how to manage 'sudoers' on 4000 machines. You don't _have_ logins directly to 4000 machines. You have a central admin host (or five) with user-level accounts. Those user-level accounts can 'sudo ssh <target>' to accomplish things as root on the remote boxes. So you propose that a trust relationship over the network is a more secure solution? I can't believe you're advocating allowing ssh logins as root as a better idea than per-admin uid 0 accounts. Given the nature of the UNIX permissions structure, any solution is going to be lacking when scaled up large enough - but the problems involved in properly administering sudo are considerly smaller than those introduced by having mulitple uid 0 accounts (especially multiple uid 0 accounts on multiple machines). You still haven't given me a single example of what these "problems" are. Just hand-waving and talk about the "right" way is. What do you do when one (or ten) of those 'interchangeable syadmins' leaves the company? _Then_ you have a real nightmare - changing root and removing uid 0 accounts on 4000 boxes. I'd rather manage /etc/sudoers, thanks very much. Are you paying attention? If one of the admins leave, his accounts (user and UID 0) are deactivated. The password on the "root" account doesn't need to be changed, assuming he/she didn't know it. Where's the nightmare there? Its the same level of effort that managing the sudoers file. If thats a nightmare in your environment, I'm sorry, you've got bigger problems. > In an situation where the team needs root; all per-admin UID 0 > accounts add is accountability and personalized shells/environments. All of which can be handled with sudo, without giving away the keys to the castle. An open sudo configuration (which Barb is advocating in her latest post) gives away those same keys. So I don't see what the benefit here is. matto [email protected]<darwin>< Flowers on the razor wire/I know you're here/We are few/And far between/I was thinking about her skin/Love is a many splintered thing/Don't be afraid now/Just walk on in. #include <disclaim.h>
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